If I remember correctly, I first read a review of Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance in the New York Times Sunday Book Review section when the novel was published in 1984. Internet research reveals this had to be the July 29, 1984 piece by Denis Donoghue. The review, overall, is unfavorable, with Donoghue saying, among other things, that what he mostly felt as he read Mailer’s latest “is the wretched inadequacy of the novel to the intention it clearly enough avows.” He was not alone in this view; Mailer’s attempt at a hardboiled-style murder mystery elicited mixed reactions. On the positive side, you had people like Christopher Ricks, in the London Review of Books, stating that “Mailer can still write like an angel, fallen and flaming…his style is largely to be trusted.” Conversely, many critics aligned with the New York Times comments, calling the book implausible or overwrought, a stew of familiar Mailer preoccupations. In any event, I do recall that even after reading the negative Times review that Sunday morning, I wanted to go buy the book. One: the idea of Mailer writing a crime novel in the Hammet and Chandler tradition, which at least in part is how the book was advertised, intrigued me. Two: I loved that he’d set the novel in Provincetown on Cape Cod, where, since I was a baby, I’d been going on vacation with my parents. The promise of a moody, noirish novel by Norman Mailer set in the winter in one of my favorite places sounded irresistible.
As in a film, we can cut here, because I didn’t get around to reading the novel for forty-two years. I read other stuff by Mailer in the meantime, but for whatever reason, as happens not infrequently, Tough Guys Don’t Dance remained on my TBR list for decades. The timing of how you get around to reading the books you do can in itself be a mystery. But I’m glad I waited so long to pick up the novel; I wonder whether I would have appreciated it as much then as I did now. I doubt I would have.
Tough Guys Don’t Dance is a prime example of a murder mystery written by a non-genre author who fashions his genre material in a most unorthodox way. If Mailer’s intention to whatever degree was to write a hard-boiled mystery novel conforming to the norms of hard-boiled mystery fiction, then you could say, as that Times review does, that the novel fails to live up to the intention it avows. I don’t disagree with that assessment. But this very “failure”, as conveyed of course by an energetic prose stylist, is precisely what I found appealing about the book. You start Mailer’s novel, caught up by the language, and it doesn’t take you long to realize that he will be twisting – dare I say, mangling – detective story tropes. Either you will go for this genre disfigurement, as I did, or you won’t.
But let’s begin with the plot. Mailer does provide one. The story’s narrator, protagonist, and investigator is Tim Madden, so we do get a telling akin to what you get in first person private eye fiction. Madden is no professional detective, however; he’s a so-so writer who 24 days after his wife has left him, wakes up with a wicked hangover to find that he has a new tattoo on his arm and that the passenger seat of his car is awash in blood. Trouble is, he can’t remember what he did the previous night. As he tries to jog his memory, images and partial scenes of what he was doing come back to him, and he encounters the Provincetown Acting Police Chief. A tip from the cop sends him to check on a marijuana patch he has some distance away on Cape Cod. In the burrow where Madden hides his cannabis yield, he finds a plastic garbage bag, and in the bag, the severed head of a blonde woman. Madden’s wife, Patty Lareine, is a blonde, and so is a woman Madden met named Jessica Pond. As he’s recalled by now, he and Jessica Pond had sex the night before. But how that night ended, he still can’t bring to mind.
Thus begins a difficult period for Madden, as he takes it upon himself to figure out who killed the woman whose head he found. Later, he will find another woman’s head in his supposedly private burrow. What is going on? Madden pokes around and talks to people, and he also digs deep into his own brain, his memories. But even by amateur standards, the guy is no great sleuth. He tends to be more reactive than proactive. He alleviates stress – how else? – by drinking excessively. And added to his mental burden: he has the nagging thought that he himself might have killed those women and buried their heads. Madden’s forced to examine not only others, but himself, to find the truth.
Sounds fairly straightforward, the plot’s bare bones. But in Mailer’s hands, the narrative is anything but. Here, again, I’ll quote the original New York Times review because I think it pinpoints where the dividing line might be for readers who like the book and readers who don’t. Alluding to the crime novel tradition Tough Guys Don’t Dance connects to, the review says that “[Dashiel] Hammett was far more equably in possession of his genre than Mailer is, so he engaged his narrative without fuss. Mailer has let his obsessions dominate the narrative, to the extent of confounding main roads with side issues, highways with detours. Where Hammett was cool, Mailer is loose…”
Exactly! You would be hard pressed to find a crime novel more discursive than Mailer’s, and in these digressions, which repeatedly delay the advancement of the main plot, I found much reading pleasure. In the course of his wanderings and investigations, Tim Madden encounters an assortment of characters – cops, local small-time criminals, a tattoo artist, a rich southern gentleman, a spiritualist medium, sexual swingers, ex-boxers – and for nearly every single person introduced, Madden has a detailed background story to give, and in some instances, we get anecdotes within anecdotes. Similarly, Provincetown itself is a character in the story, with Madden spending considerable time talking about its topography, history, and influence on its denizens. I’d read Mailer’s 1975 book The Fight, about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman bout, just before reading Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and at times while reading the novel, I felt as if I was reading Mailer the journalist as much as Mailer the novelist. In The Fight, Mailer recounts everything about the famous event from its buildup to its aftermath, but most of the book is actually taken up with his musings. He observes and gives commentary about all the participants involved. He reflects on boxing, racism, Blackness, Africa, America, Bantu religion, the use of language, etc. In the book’s final chapters comes the actual fight. Tough Guys Don’t Dance has a comparable structure, with Madden’s meditations and character studies almost overwhelming what there is of a linear plot.
As I suggested earlier, I think if I had read the book when it came out, I would have been less tolerant of its discursiveness. I would have wanted something more direct from a mystery novel. But all these years later, a good deal older, much as I still love a streamlined crime tale, I got a kick out of reading one specific tale with such unpredictable timing and beats, beats you don’t usually get from a practiced crime fiction writer. Yes, the book touch does on recognizable Mailer obsessions – sexuality, violence, masculinity, cancer, the meaning of coincidence in life, and so on – but I enjoyed the tension between the idiosyncratic mode of narration and the constraints of the genre Mailer attempts to adhere to.
Still, it’s a little odd that the tough guy crime fiction tradition is the one that Mailer’s book gets tied to the most. It does function as a pastiche of Chandler and company’s works and it does qualify as noir, but in its tone and general atmosphere, it has closer affinities with a writer who wrote horror as well as detective stories, and that’s Edgar Allan Poe. While reading Tough Guys Don’t Dance, with its New England setting and its emphasis on the narrator’s emotional convolutions, with its spooky séance and the severed heads, with its characters who talk about the duality of the human mind, the coexistence in one person of the rational being and the mad being, you can’t not think of Poe. Mailer’s book is one I would call a blend of the grotesque and the arabesque, using those words in the way Poe implied when he titled a collection of his stories Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Broadly defined, the grotesque stories feature satire, physical horror, and absurdity. Stories such as “The Man That was Used Up” and “The Cask of Amontillado” fit this bill. Arabesque stories concentrate on psychological terror and disintegration, as in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Mailer’s novel abounds in all these qualities, and his dense, rich, coruscating style, though entirely his own, has more in common with Poe’s Gothic exuberances than with any of the staccato noirists.
How did all this translate to film when Mailer wrote and directed the adaptation? The movie, released in 1987, opened to mainly poor reviews and bombed at the box office. It has the notorious Ryan O’Neal “Oh man, oh god, oh man, oh god, oh man, oh god,” line reading, which he and the film’s crew members wanted edited out of the picture but which Mailer insisted on keeping in. He thought the scene worked at the time but later, on seeing audience reactions to it, admitted it was a disaster. But that scene alone doesn’t sink the film, and, in fact, having watched it after finishing the book, I have to say I find it entertaining. You get the sense that it aims to keep you off balance, and with its recurring changes of tone, from ominous to parodic to deadpan to ominous, it succeeds at doing that. There are a number of moments where you say, “I’m not quite sure what that was,” and these add to the fun.
In terms of the storyline, Mailer sticks to the basics of his novel, but he can’t make a commercial film that is as digressive as his book. To overcome this, he structures the film in a style reminiscent of classic film noirs like Out of the Past and Criss Cross, using a series of flashbacks complete with voiceovers. This works, partly, but as the movie rolled along, I found myself enjoying it most for its use of the Provincetown setting and for the unhinged flourishes by its actors. Frances Fisher, Wings Hauser, Debra Sandlund, Isabella Rossellini – they all get a chance to sink into their roles with a mannered gusto that tells us they are enjoying themselves. Lawrence Tierney brings a touch of gravitas and delivers some amusing lines with a sharp delivery. But there is no visual equivalent for Mailer’s prose style, and since there isn’t, the movie depends more on its plot being compelling than the book does. I can’t say the film succeeds in this area, but it still exists as a curious artefact. You can’t say the film’s not “Mailer”, and in this, it is like the book.
